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SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

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Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#171

Post by badloginagain »

cmyr wrote: post #103

Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community. I was talking about this with a friend recently who is a programmer and a (relatively) well known composer, and she made the point that soundcloud actually represents a very important cultural document; there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it…

When Grooveshark shut down, I lost some fantastic artists. There was a low-distraction music station for programmers [writhem radio] I would listen to, which was gaining some popularity and would have music guests DJ their new stuff.

When Grooveshark died, that set of original music spun by the DJs was essentially lost- which sucked because that was my go-to for "work music". I've only started to find the tracks again, some on soundcloud, YouTube, etc.

Worst part is, the guys responsible for the music station, which was definitely growing, hasn't done much to start again. It's understandable, when you think of how difficult it is to grow a brand from nothing.

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#172

Post by zimpenfish »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #132
jeffbr13 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my company we have a bunch of content that's only archived on SoundCloud. The main barrier I've had to backing up original uploads (only available through the web interface) is the terrible reliability of all the AJAX calls. Even with browser automation, it requires a LOT of error-handling just to navigate between resources successfully. It seems that all these microservices[1] are there for the sake of blogging a…

Have you tried using youtube-dl? It extracts the relevant data from Soundcloud's JSON API to perform the download: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ I know you mentioned originals are only accessible through the web interface, but I was not sure if you were aware of the JSON API.

Oh, I didn't know that. I ended up writing my own SoundcloudSync.py to keep a backup. Not very sophisticated but easy enough to run by hand whenever I upload something new.

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#174

Post by zimpenfish »

jeffbr13 wrote: post #126
toomuchtodo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have backups of your tracks into case Soundcloud goes away? EDIT: Its on my to do list to write a pipeline for Soundcloud for Archive Team this weekend. Just in case. That doesn't pickup private tracks though. Backup your stuff!!

At my company we have a bunch of content that's only archived on SoundCloud. The main barrier I've had to backing up original uploads (only available through the web interface) is the terrible reliability of all the AJAX calls. Even with browser automation, it requires a LOT of error-handling just to navigate between resources successfully. It seems that all these microservices[1] are there for the sake of blogging a…

I seem to be getting originals through the JSON interface - the MD5s of the downloaded m4as match the MD5 of the m4as I've got in Audioshare.

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#176

Post by sbierwagen »

zanny wrote: post #125
aback wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when people argue that "digital distribution is essentially free," then ask why Soundcloud is losing money, since distributing music is literally their only real cost of doing business. we will continue to endure substantial cultural losses for so long as people continue to believe that content can & should be distributed and consumed for free. ultimately some sort of micropayments + blockchain-like-cloudserving migh…

If you used something like ipfs, syncthing, or generic torrents you could easily distribute anything you want at large scale at no cost, as long as people were interested in having it. If you choose to centralize distribution on one web server that is your own choice, but the better phrase is "digital distribution is free if you want it to be". I doubt we will see a return to pay-to-listen models in music. Reality ha…

  If you used something like ipfs, syncthing, or generic 
  torrents you could easily distribute anything you want at 
  large scale at no cost, as long as people were interested 
  in having it.
The problem there of course is the "as long as people were interested in having it" part. You can publish stuff for free on Freenet, but to a first approximation, nobody actually uses Freenet. If a torrent/magnet URI runs out of seeds then it dies forever, unless you have a way to contact former seeds and beg them to give you a copy, etc etc. Bandwidth costs money, and always will. Distributing files costs money, and always will.

The UX of peer-to-peer file sharing will always be more complex than "go to this WWW URL" if just to avoid the free-rider/spam problem.

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#177

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #122
raesene4 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I'd agree there's no other facts. links from the article include excerpts from their financial accounts which don't look good (losing 39M on a 17M turnover is not healthy). And the quote from the auditor is significant, auditors don't put that kind of thing in unless they have to as it annoys their customers to be reminded that there's significant concern over their ability to continue operations.

Do they have public accounts? I can't understand what SoundCloud could spend $60M USD on? Apparently they have over 300 employees, what do they do all day? Clearly I don't understand their operation.

According to the 2014 accounts the employees earn a little less than €100,000 each, on average. So there's a huge wage bill.

I have no idea what they do either. Legal compliance - DMCAs, and avoiding DMCAs - seems to be a big problem. But I don't understand why they need 300 people to work on that.

if they raised $77m last year that gives them another year or two of runway. But given the continuing losses the current business model doesn't seem to be working, and the burn rate is too high for long term survival without real income growth.

As a user, I love finding music on SC. But I worry they'll try to make the site yet another pay-to-play streaming service, which will kill most of the interest.

Becoming a sales site seems like a better move. IMO there's a big niche for a Bandcamp-but-better site just waiting to be filled.

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#178

Post by degenerate »

shams93 wrote: post #175

This is why archive.org with your own netlabel is a better choice, theyre not for profit so the bar is lower fir their survival. The more we donate to them the better they get too!

Thanks for sharing - first time I've heard of their Netlabels (weird name imo):

https://archive.org/details/netlabels

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#179

Post by kolmogorov »

80k average salary is crazy for a Berlin based company. They have a reputation of poaching engineers and granting them crazy salary increases. They then also let them do kind of whatever they feel like with whatever tech stack which may work if you have a money printing service but is questionable for the stage they are in.

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#180

Post by dntrkv »

adriand wrote: post #66
strgrd wrote: post #14

I've been a daily soundcloud user for almost 6 years. At some point they gave up on trying to change or improve the user experience. Soundcloud has done nothing to facilitate the growth of users who focus on reposting/finding/sharing/curating content, vs. content creators who upload their own music. There is no way to gain a following or reputation as someone who reposts content on soundcloud -- and even if you have…

I absolutely love Soundcloud and also use it daily - I am listening to it right now - but it's an absolute disgrace how little they've done to improve the platform. It seems like such a total waste of potential. The issues with the UI/UX are obvious and there are clear ways to improve on the situation. A number of people have done unsolicited Soundcloud redesigns, but there was an excellent one in December 2014 that…

My biggest complaint about Soundcloud is their lack of pagination, sorting, or shuffling (real shuffling, not just shuffling the 20 tracks that come in with every infinite scroll page). I have well over a thousand likes on my profile and the only way to listen to some of my earlier likes is to sit there like an idiot and scroll through a hundred pages of infinite scroll.

Also, their iOS app doesn't cache songs. The lack of caching on its own has forced me to go back to Spotify for 99% of my music. I'm not about to pay $80/month for data just for Soundcloud.

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